The Open Humanities Awards support innovative projects that use open data, open content or open source to further teaching or research in the humanities.

What are they?

Humanities research is based on the interpretation and analysis of wide variety of cultural artefacts including texts, images and audiovisual material. Much of this material is now freely and openly available on the internet enabling people to discover, connect and contextualise cultural artefacts in ways previously very difficult.

We are challenging humanities researchers, designers and developers to build upon the research, tools and data of the DM2E project or to create new innovative projects that use open content, open data or open source to further teaching or research in the humanities.

There are two tracks in this second round of the competition:

DM2E track
The DM2E project has developed several tools to support Digital Humanities research, such as Pundit (a semantic web annotation tool) and Omnom (a tool to process mappings from one data format to another and publish the result as Linked Open Data). The project has also developed a software platform, which makes use of open-source tools to build applications on top of the Linked Data produced in the DM2E project as well as the annotations created by scholars using Pundit.

These tools and the platform are fully open source: the code and documentation is available through our DM2E wiki, the data is at data.dm2e.eu. Useful background information is also provided through our deliverable D3.3.

For this track, we invite you to submit a project building on this DM2E research, for example:

Building open source tools or applications based on the API’s developed

A project focused on the visualisation of data coming from Pundit

A deployment of the tools for specific communities

A project using data aggregated by DM2E in an innovative way

An extension of the platform by means of a practical demonstrative application

Open track
For this track, all submissions that involve open content, open data and/or open source tools and make a contribution to humanities research are welcome - the choice is yours! For example you might want to:

Start a project to collaboratively transcribe, annotate, or translate public domain texts

Explore patterns of citation, allusion and influence using bibliographic metadata or textmining

We reserve the right to amend or add to these rules - so please check back here for the latest version!

By entering the competition you accept that we are not liable for any loss, damage, cost, and so on, incurred or suffered by you, and that we cannot accept responsibility for injury or disappointment suffered by you, or technical malfunction, and so on and so on.

In addition to these rules, the following will be taken into account when judging the entries:

Collaborations between individuals, groups or organisations in different EU member states are encouraged.

While not required, using open licenses for any resarch, code, content and data entered as part of the competition are encouraged.

Unfortunately we don't have the budget to process entries in all EU languages. We want to devote as much of the sponsorship money as possible to prizes so we ask potential entrants to write their submissions in English, please. Sorry about that.

Where can I find existing open stuff?

The Internet Archive, Wikisource and Europeana have millions of texts, images and metadata about cultural heritage objects the vast majority of which is openly licensed. They are always good places to start.

The Open Knowledge Foundation's Culture Labs lists a number of useful open-source tools for working with open humanities data and content.